


GOTT IST MIT UNS (God is With Us)

by StellarRequiem



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Crisis of Faith, Crowley blames himself, Crowley's self loathing, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, History, Whump, World War I, angelic crisis, angry at God about WWI on main, history whump, the / or & I went back and forth on because I meant / but it's not explicitly /, though the comforting is not entirely successful, world war whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-13
Updated: 2019-09-13
Packaged: 2020-10-17 11:34:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20620358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StellarRequiem/pseuds/StellarRequiem
Summary: Crowley and Aziraphale meet in No Man's Land, and question who is responsible.





	GOTT IST MIT UNS (God is With Us)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Debesmanna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Debesmanna/gifts).

The writing on the corpse's buckle translates to “_God is with us,_” but Aziraphale—nor any of the other host that he knows of—hasn’t been here before. France, yes, but not _here_, in this particular muddy field where this young man died. Well, what is now a field. It used to be forested, this pockmarked, cratered place, but the trees are gone, now. Exploded to wood chips like shrapnel, all of which have long since sunk into the mire, drowned in the little lakes that have formed where artillery shells have punched holes in the earth. He walks between these rank pools like a ghost, trying to understand these leavings of humanity. The craters. The corpses. No one notices him picking his way along because he doesn’t want to be noticed. No sniper fire comes his way. No eyes look up from their trenches.

Except for two.

A hundred yards away, from the opposing trench, a figure in a different shade of uniform than his—as if it matters, in this of all wars—scrambles up into the mud, dodging coiled strands of barbed wire. His head is bare, and Aziraphale can see the shock of red hair even before he can make out the burning yellow of the eyes.

_Crowley._

He jogs as best he can over the uneven ground to where Aziraphale stands, stepping around the corpse. Something desperately like fury is in those eyes.

“You,” he snaps, when he’s close enough to be heard, “what have your lot done? Is _this _the ineffable plan?” He spits the word _plan_. Aziraphale staggers as if struck.

“_My _lot? This has nothing to do with me, Crowley. In fact, I could ask you the same thing.”

“I didn’t do this,” he seethes.

“Well, maybe not _directly--"_

Crowley talks right over him.

“I didn’t do it, and we didn’t do it. _Hastur _couldn’t have thought this up.”

“It surely wasn’t _heaven, _Crowley,” Aziraphale retorts, doing nothing to hide his revulsion at the continued implication of Crowley’s words.

“_Somebody_ did it--” he snaps. Aziraphale has rarely seen such rage from Crowley.

“It wasn’t mi--" he tries to insist again, getting truly short with Crowley now. But he’s not done yet. He plows over Aziraphale’s words with his own:

“_—_and now_ I can’t stop it_.”

Aziraphale’s replies die on his tongue in an instant.

Over those few short words, Crowley’s voice has cracked from hissing to shaking. Like all he'd had to support him was rage, and finding no fit target for it here, he’s now imploding. The rest of the words that emerge from him come with weak, airless speed. Just a tumble of sound he cannot seem to stop.

“I can’t tempt every soldier not to fire,” he says. “I can’t jam every gun. I can’t--"

His voice breaks apart completely, the words turning to a dry, meaningless crackle in his throat.

It takes Aziraphale a beat of swallowing air—and everything he thought he knew of the situation—to speak back.

“You’ve . . . Been doing that? Those sorts of things? Won’t that . . . Isn’t that . . . Could it get you in trouble?” he almost askes _isn’t _that dangerous, but thinks better of it and the worry it brings to his voice. It was not so long ago that worry for Crowley turned to disdain in his tone, and they’d stomped away from each other under the London sunset.

Crowley looks him hard in the eye and answers with a slur like every second of his thousands of years is dragging on his tongue.

“Mischief, isn’t it? ‘S what I do.” He’s never sounded so hollow.

“Oh. So. It’s allowed, then.” _Hell really didn’t do this._

_And you are safe._

Crowley ignores him.

“And what do _you_ do?” He demands instead, “What _good _are you doing in, in . . .” he gestures broadly to the wasteland around them, reeking of corpses and gunpowder, at the mud which harbors the rats that devour the dead, “in _this_?”

Aziraphale, for a moment, cant meet his eyes. Those radiant eyes, so on fire with pain.

“I don’t know, yet. I’ve only just arrived,” he says softly. “Here. At the front. I was . . .” he gestures vaguely at the symbol for a medic we wears emblazoned on his arm, “miracles. In the rear. And there was this boy. He came in, his hand . . . They said he must have--"

“Did it on purpose,” Crowley says. It’s like an echo, so faint and empty. “Get away from the front.”

Aziraphale nods.

“Apparently, that does happen. And it, well. It was time I came to see what they’re so desperate to get away _from_.”

“And?” Aziraphale imagines Crowley means to snarl, but there just doesn’t seem to be anything left of him to throw behind it. “What _do _you see , Angel?”

Aziraphale bites his lip, but not hard enough to stop his own voice, and exactly what he thinks comes out his mouth in a bitter murmur.

“It’s how I imagine hell,” he says, and Crowley looks away for a moment with his entire body, pivoting almost from the hip, pressing his eyes closed. When he looks round again it’s with a stare that looks through Aziraphale to the waste of no man’s land without seeming to see any of it.

“And they did it all by themselves, then.” Crowley’s voice is cold.

“So it would seem.”

“Free will,” Crowley spits without venom. “The Fallen were right not to love them. The knowledge of good and evil, and this is what they do with it.”

There is something jagged in his voice. Aziraphale’s breath catches in his throat.

_Oh._

_Oh, Crowley._

It takes him a moment to react—a kind of delay to it, because it’s so far outside the norm for them, to try and say something with touch instead of words--but Aziraphale moves forward, as slowly as if the mud were quicksand, the muck pulling at his feet, to take Crowley’s face in his hands. He’s never seen him so startled as he is when he does that—eyes too bright against the circles underneath them.

“You didn’t do this, Crowley,” he says, aiming for stern and coming out with something aching, instead. “If it really wasn’t hell, and it wasn’t heaven, it certainly wasn’t _you_.”

He can see it in Crowley’s eyes: he doesn’t believe him.

The demon shudders away from his touch, stepping back and almost putting a foot through the corpse on the ground in the process. The mud groans around the suddenness of the movement, resisting him.

“Crowley--"

He puts a hand up between them, meeting Aziraphale’s eyes with something so broken in his expression that Aziraphale chokes, and cannot call out to stop him as he whirls around and stumbles back to his trench without a look over his shoulder.

Aziraphale stands frozen in place. _Crowley, wait, _he imagines, pictures what it would be like to stomp to the opposite trench, drop down to the groaning, soggy duckboards grab Crowley by the collar if he has to. _I mean it—this wasn’t you._ And Crowley would ask, _Who was it, then? _And if Aziraphale said _humanity, _Crowley would only turn his back on him again. Perhaps he could say something else. _War did this. I heard her whooping as she rode down the line. Pestilence did this, I smelled him in our trench with the rats and the rotting skin of those boys' feet. _And Crowley would say, _humans made _them_, angel._ That would seem like his chance--_Yes, humans, exactly, Crowley! _But no. It wouldn’t be enough. _And who taught the humans about evil? _He would say, or think, anyway. _Who tempted them out of a paradise without war?_

And what could Aziraphale say to that? Where else could he lay blame?

He turned and drifted back to his trench.

He stood at the lip of it for a while, watching the soldiers. Boys, really. They were supposed to be eighteen at minimum—but boys lied. They lied for their fathers, for their country, for valor and curiosity. And now they were here, in this dank hole. Here with mud swelling and bubbling over the duckboards into their boots, wet clinging to their feet until they rotted from their legs, the smell of decay blurring into the other scents of shit and blood and sweating bodies teaming with lice. And for what? For whom?

_God is with us, _that man’s buckle had said.

_But how can this be the work of_—

Aziraphale can’t think anything more. He can’t bring the words to shape in his mind, can’t let himself voice the one retort he could bring to Crowley after all.

_You didn’t do this. _Crowley showed them an apple, yes, but he wasn’t the one who cast them out. He wasn’t the one that put it there. Wasn’t—

No. He is an angel, and perhaps he is a coward as well, because he cannot finish the thought. And he does not turn around to run back across No Man’s Land, shouting Crowley’s name. Does not pass again the corpse with that indictment on his uniform_. _Does not lay blame to the ineffable, but crawls back into his trench with silent thoughts to wait out the pinnacle of war with this doomed generation of men and boys.

In the trenches the soldiers say, _God is with us._


End file.
